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Nesting: The Art of Organization (January)

I’m a bit of a slob and a hoarder and lazy.. not as bad as those people on TV, but more than Minh would like. I kinda leave my stuff around in piles, and I am more or less content with what hoarders and messy people like to call “organized chaos”. Stacks and piles of seemingly unorganized stuff, but of course I know exactly where everything is.. right? Minh can’t stand it.. and usually he silently accepts my mess thinking that I will clean it up “tomorrow”, or he’ll move my crap (neatly) to the dining table and tell me that I “need to go through it” (which is Minh-code for “clean up your crap”).

Case in point… my jewelry. It used to sit on our dresser in piles, and stored away in boxes, because I didn’t have a good system for organizing all my jewelry (which actually isn’t that much). My original plan was to build a jewelry cabinet to hang in the bathroom, hidden behind a poster/photograph of a light painting by Pablo Picasso. I had planned it.. even drew it out and made a cut-list.. and then never got around to it. So my jewelry continued to sit on our dresser in “organized” piles.

This is organized.. right?

Minh finally sent me a bunch of links to jewelry cabinets, and I settled on one that was pretty descent. It only took me about an hour to organize all my jewelry in the cabinet and our room is much cleaner for it, but man did it take a long time for me to finally get around to putting it away.

BH&G Jewelry Stand from Walmart

Room for EVERYTHING!

On the other hand.. sometimes I can be really good about organization.. for instance with our deep freezer. Minh and I like to bargain shop for groceries at our local Mexican market (meat and produce is much cheaper there, the quality is good enough for us.. and you can also find different types of off-cuts of meat that you don’t typically find in your standard markets.. like hooves and tongue and blood). We don’t do it often, but when we do we go ALL OUT and stock up on meats. Our last trip included 25 chicken drumstick for only $7! To keep the meat from going bad, I vacuum seal them in two-person servings and toss them in the freezer.

mm.. Frozen meat… and tamales..

We keep a list of everything we have in the freezer on the top lid. That way, we don’t have to go digging through the freezer to figure out what we have, and we can easily see what we have so we can plan meals (if planning meals was our thing.. which it sometimes is, but more often than not, we are winging our weeknight meals and throwing things together on the fly).

Chicken. Beef. Pork. Seafood. Dinosaur.

And a final note on organization in January… cleaning up Christmas. While I was taking down the ornaments from the Christmas tree, I developed a system to get all of the ornaments into one storage box.. YES! This really only works with shatterproof ornaments.. so no dice if you’ve got old-school glass ornaments: